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THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 26, 2013
world. "The West is cheating us," he
said. "If they wanted to knock out the
regime, it wouldn't take them more than
ten days. We don't have anything. They
give us promises---but empty promises.
They want the struggle to continue and
ruin the country."
Srour said he had been raised to hate
the Israelis, but now he was calling on
anyone, even Israel, to invade his coun-
try. "I don't want to pray at the Al Aqsa
Mosque in Jerusalem!" he said. "Our
enemy is Bashar, not Israel. We want to
live our lives in peace. I'm thirty, and I
haven't seen a good day in my life."
I told Srour that the West, foremost
the United States, was not likely to invade
Syria, that the Obama Administration
considered the opposition too fractured,
too reliant on hard-line Islamist groups
like Al Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda affiliate
pledged to the establishment of an Islamic
caliphate with Sharia law. Srour, like so
many refugees, balked at this. It was true,
he said, that the opposition is divided,
but that was only because of the initial
lack of support from abroad. He admit-
ted, too, that it was "unhelpful" for for-
eigners to hear grisly reports of murder by
the opposition and see videos of grotesque
abuse, like the infamous video of a rebel
commander standing over a dead Syrian
Army soldier and eating a piece of his
lung. "That was bad for the image of the
Sunni people," he said.
We were sitting on the veranda of a
hotel in downtown Amman, having din-
ner. Throughout the conversation, an as-
sociate of Srour's, a silent young man, sat
next to me and eyed me suspiciously.
When the talk turned to the nature of the
opposition and Al Nusra, he shrugged
and handed me his iPhone. On it was a
picture of a child, no more than two or
three, grievously wounded, probably
dead. This was all he needed to know
about Syria, and, he thought, all that any-
one needed to know. At that point,
Srour, the smuggler, the translator, the
student of English literature, got up and
said, "We appeal to the international
community to invade Syria. I speak on
behalf of one million people from Dara'a."
Refugee camps are born of emer-
gency and evolve into cities of de-
pendency, bureaucracy, and static suffer-
ing. They rescue human beings, and
then they warehouse them. They relieve
the host country of the financial burden
and diffuse it among the member states
of the United Nations. Dadaab, in
Kenya, is the biggest refugee camp in
the world---the only one bigger than
Za'atari. It was built for around ninety
thousand people, and now houses
nearly half a million. Established two
decades ago to care for Somalis fleeing
civil war, famine, and drought, Dadaab
has been around for so long that there
are ten thousand "Dadaab grandchil-
dren"---children of children born in
the camp.
There are no Za'atari grandchildren,
of course, but two thousand babies have
been born in the camp, with as many
as seventy more arriving each week.
Za'atari is now the fourth-largest popu-
lation center in Jordan. The expansion
and restructuring never seems to end.
After the first phase of construction
came the clinics and food-distribution
centers, sanitation, water storage, elec-
tricity, schools, communal prefab kitch-
ens, communal prefab toilets and show-
ers, public transport, police and security
outposts. And soon, in the western part
of the camp, along the Champs-Ély-
sées, came shawarma and chicken and
pizza joints; coffee and tea houses; ap-
pliance stores where you can get a fan, a
flat-screen TV, an air-conditioner; a
beauty salon where you can get your
eyebrows threaded or your hair dyed
and cut; Abu Mohammad's bridal shop,
where, for a few hours, you can rent a
wedding gown and a "limo" for the re-
ception. Sometimes the profits stay with
the refugees; sometimes they are used to
fund the Free Syrian Army.
The medical burden in the camp is
incalculable: amputations, tuberculosis,
typhoid, hepatitis, malnutrition, and di-
arrhea. Often, the refugees need serious
medical attention. Dominique Hyde,
who works closely with the refugees in
Za'atari for UNICEF, said, "I don't get
emotional, usually." But last year she met
a couple and their three children. They
had come from Homs, where their
house had been shelled. "The mother
had just given birth, and two of the kids,
their faces were completely deformed---
and the father's arms, too, as he tried to
save them from the fire. These children
are disfigured and their lives are scarred
forever. The mother refuses to let them
go near any mirrors."
UNICEF and other organizations have
provided makeshift schools for the tens
of thousands of children in the camp,
LOLA'S SECRET POTION
She crosses lint
with the common alpine bog moss.
Mum's the word, so liquidate it.
I'm sorry. I cannot tell you
what brand of dish soap I use.
That's privileged information, Owen.
She crosses arabesques
with the Canary Islands yellow pages.
Have a nice day, so liquidate it.
I'm sorry. I cannot tell you
how soft-shell crabs reinvent.
That's privileged information, Erin.
She crosses box turtles
with a zero-coupon-bond aqueduct.
X marks the spot, so liquidate it.
I'm sorry, Lola. I cannot tell you
when alpha and beta switch.
That's privileged information.
---Linda Kunhardt